William H Rehnquist

The federal courts are in danger of being overwhelmed if Congress persists in assigning U.S. judges the responsibility for handling new cases involving guns, drug murders and sexual assaults, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said Tuesday in a year-end report. Rehnquist, a former Phoenix attorney, compared the federal court system to a Western desert town facing overdevelopment amid a water shortage. "In that situation, we must conserve water, not think of building new subdivisions," he said.

A panel of senior federal judges, in an apparent rebuff to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, called on Congress Wednesday to enact legal safeguards for defendants in capital cases and Death Row inmates. The Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making body for the federal courts, said that murder defendants should be assured of competent legal representation, beginning with their trials and extending through any appeals, up to the nation's highest court.

The number of drug cases filed in the federal courts has more than tripled in the past decade, putting an extraordinary burden on already overworked judges, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said in an end-of-the year report on the federal judiciary being released today. "From a federal law enforcement perspective, the war on drugs will fail if the judiciary is not given the judgeships necessary to do the job," Rehnquist wrote.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist on Wednesday denied a request by a coalition of 16 Muslim groups to remove a bas-relief of Muhammad from the wall of the courtroom where the U.S. Supreme Court meets, which Muslims complained denigrated their prophet. The 7th century religious leader is shown as one among a pantheon of 18 great lawgivers of history represented on the courtroom walls.

Justice John Paul Stevens spent 35 years on the Supreme Court writing legal opinions. So it's not surprising his first book, "Five Chiefs," is chock-full of opinions — about where his fellow justices went wrong. For example, Stevens, 91 and retired, describes Bush vs. Gore — the decision that resolved the contentious 2000 presidential election — as the result of a "frivolous" appeal that shouldn't have been granted. That was a "low point" in his tenure on the court, he said in a recent interview.

A Phoenix area home owned by Supreme Court Chief Justice-designate William H. Rehnquist for eight years in the 1960s had a restrictive deed that barred its sale to anyone but whites, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy said today on the third day of Rehnquist's confirmation hearing. The disclosure came a day after it was revealed that Rehnquist's summer home in Vermont has a restrictive deed barring the land's sale to Jews.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy had just been sworn in as the newest U.S. Supreme Court justice a few years ago when a young couple stopped him on the courthouse steps and asked him to take time out for a photograph. It was not for a photo of him. Instead, they wanted this pleasant stranger to take a snapshot of them. Kennedy dutifully complied, and the smiling couple left without a clue that the man who had snapped their picture was a Supreme Court justice.

After a winter drive across the upper Midwest in an unheated Studebaker, a 27-year-old Stanford law graduate arrived at the Supreme Court on Feb. 1, 1952. It was his first day as a law clerk, and his first glimpse of the grand white-marble facade of the high court. But he was no ordinary rookie, awed and unsure of himself. William H.

Only weeks after legal experts questioned whether the Supreme Court's Florida recount ruling might be political, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said he hoped the U.S. court system "will seldom, if ever" become embroiled in another presidential election. Rehnquist's annual report to Congress on the U.S. judiciary did not mention the criticism leveled against the high court.

Responding to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the death of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, congressional leaders announced Monday that they were retooling their legislative agenda to give top priority to storm relief and recovery measures. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.